Interview from the exhibition catalogue.
(scroll down for portuguese version)

A Suspension of Disbelief

A dialogue about the boundaries between representation, fiction, reality and originality.
Miguel Soares and Filipa Ramos

Filipa Ramos: I would like to know more about your training…
Miguel Soares: My contact with photography begins around 1985 at the Photography Club of the D. Pedro V high school in Lisbon. The club was oriented by professor Emilio Felício, who also taught chemistry, and it focused on the laboratory part in black-and-white, in other words, on the chemical side of photography.
In 1988 I enrolled in the Course of Photographic Studies at the Ar.Co.. During the first year I had Lúcia Vasconcelos as a teacher, which gave me a lot of enthusiasm, and the following year I had José Soudo, a great reference for all those who had him as a teacher. During that same year, which was an interim before entering the school of Fine Arts, I enrolled in a workshop of free drawing at the Monumental Gallery with the painter Manuel San Payo. At that time it was one of the most interesting and active galleries in Lisbon. It was when the photographer Álvaro Rosendo invited me to do an individual show. I was twenty years old and it was the beginning of an eleven-year relationship with that gallery.
In 1989 I entered the University of Fine Arts in Lisbon, were I got a degree in Equipment Design, on one hand to learn about different materials, and on the other because I didn’t want to spend five years painting and drawing, for I have been doing that since I was very young. What was important during this period was the creation of a group of friends, or it would have been an arduous experience. Among the members of that group were Miguel Mendonça (no longer with us), Tiago Batista, Alexandre Estrela, Nuno Silva, Pedro Cabral Santo, Rui Serra, Rui Toscano and Paulo Mendes. We soon began organizing collective shows in and outside the University. Exhibits like 1990, Faltam nove para 2000 or Wallmate (1995) in the University, Independent Worm Saloon at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes (1994), or O Império Contra-Ataca at the ZDB (1998); and Jamba (1997), Biovid (1998) and Espaço 1999, at the Sala do Veado, among others.

FR: Are there any coordinates that modelled your present work? I could identify certain elements, like a reflection on what is real, a link between music and images, and an analysis of the mechanisms that regulate and determine perception, but I would like to hear it from you …
MS: There are interests which are constant from the beginning, because I am almost always centred on investigation and experimentation, but I think my concerns have varied quite a lot over time. The sort of things I did in 1992 were already very different from what I’ve done the previous year, and I believe that it has always been a bit like that. Howevere, sometimes I like to recapitulate and to tackle questions that I can rethink or improve, either for technological reasons, due to time, or to other motives. It is extremely difficult for me to identify the connecting threads that have prevailed during all this time. As an example I do know that music only starts appearing directly in my work around 1994. In terms of photography, between 1990 and 1994, I was a lot more interested in iconology and symbolism than I am nowadays. I think that my interest in design and architecture, as man-made creations, together with science, have been the most constant elements in my work over the years.

FR: In fact, it is easy to recognize an interest for design and architecture, especially in the second half of the 1990’s, when you created objects like Racing (1994) or Beep (1998). In the same way, science seems to be a constant. I remember once Pedro Cabrita Reis said that he imagined you as one of those kids that were always playing with robots and carrying out chemistry experiments!
Sometimes your work seems to be made in order to underline its basic and curious elements. This can be seen thorough the repetition of certain aspects (like in Untitled (Playing with Gould Playing Bach), 2007). It also happens when you another element, like in Expecting to Fly (1999-2001), in which the music of Buffalo Springfield gives a certain poetic/ironic touch to the situation, absurd and surreal in itself, of an automobile accident on a road with no movement. In what way are you interested in revealing tiny details in daily practices, using a photographic frame?
MS: I’m not sure I worry about that, except in the sense of the punctum that Roland Barthes mentions, the discovery of some element in an image that makes it special.
But we can analyse that individually. The repetition of Glenn Gould’s video deals with the fact that I have read about him being autistic. I had already used some Gould piano samples in my music, and I started thinking that if I had an image to accompany it, his autism – which wasn’t at all clear to me – would become obvious, and that’s what I tried to do in this video. I decided to compose four themes of about two or three minutes each, based only on segments of six to ten seconds of the Brandenburg Concert No. 5, filmed in 1962. In total, I used more or less half a minute to produce ten minutes. I mounted the sound by doing hundreds of tiny little cuts, without paying attention to the image, that came by association, just as if I was mounting music using the “cut and paste” method in an audio programme.
Expecting to Fly was quite a different process. That scene was filmed in 1999 and I spent two years trying to figure out what to do with it. I knew I had to find the right music to follow up the other video that I had filmed on my balcony (Untitled (two), 1999), but I only made up my mind in 2001.

FR: Still talking about the use of apparently banal and daily elements, from which one can make new interpretations of what surround us, I would like to know a bit more about your new series Planets, (2008). In this case you used conventional photography to create a series of illusions that are unveiled as we pass through the images …
MS: My uncle illuminates his backyard with a series of round lights made in something that resembles Plexiglass. The lamp posts are about a meter high and the spheres are approximately twenty five centimetres. They are very old and you can notice it: some have moss, others have holes and cigarette burns, others have mud stains or insect debris, and some have yellowed. The type of light bulb used also varies, some are white or bluish and others are more yellow. What I did was to considerably close the diaphragm of the camera and photograph all the spheres from above, so that one couldn’t see the posts. They look like planets. Only at the end do I open slightly the diaphragm to reveal the mystery of a solar system that lies sleeping in my uncle’s yard.

FR: The craters and palindromes portray an almost puerile curiosity to test the reality of things, their possibility of existing in slightly altered conditions. Where is this interest or desire to investigate a subtly distorted reality coming from?
MS: I am quite interested in it. It is almost like a scientific process: the hypothesis is formulated and then a series of tests are carried out to prove it. That is what happens in the series with the limousines (Liine, 2007). Or, for example, in the series retarC (2007), in which I thought that if I turned a crater upside-down it would look like a plateau. This idea came to me when I saw pictures of underground explosions that created slight elevations on the surface. I experimented, and it worked with some of the craters. I realized that the light was crucial for creating this effect, and sometimes I inverted the image so that the light would come always from the left, making the illusion bigger.

FR: Sometimes you seem to take hold of the original images and alter them, recovering, let’s say, a certain primeval state of the elements represented. This is visible both in some of your earlier pieces, and recently in the series where you “remove” a part which had actually been an addition, giving back a more conventional look to the automobile (Liine). How do you characterize this interest in manipulating reality through photography?
MS: The case of the limousines had been in my head for over ten years because they look like normal cars that have been artificially stretched in a Photoshop, (the first ones I saw where on television and in magazines). I did this series mainly to satisfy my curiosity – how would the backgrounds look? Would the car seem like a normal car? Of course, there are second meanings: a shortening of distances, an appeal to slow down, environmental issues, an anti nouveau riche feeling, the effect of teleportation created by the transition of before and after the cut (visible in the Liine video, 2007). But all these interpretations depend on who is seeing it.

FR: I find a similar attitude in Untitled (playing with Gould playing Bach) in which the chosen frames gained a certain suspension, between a movement and a static side, which characterizes all the representations of passed, and unrepeatable, elements. You appear to take photographs through the annulation the image’s movement in time. In what way can a picture result from video?
MS: As I explained previously, I fragemented small portions of the concert into hundreds of slices, sometimes in one, two or three frames, and with them I tried to compose music. The fact that each second of film consisted of twenty four photographs (photograms), or twenty five in the case of television or PAL video, enabled each photograph to be accompanied by a moment of sound with a certain duration – in cinema, 41,66 thousandths of a second of sound. This amount of time is more than enough to work with and, even eventually to stretch it in audio editing programes. If the sound is at 48KHz, it can still be divided into two thousand smaller slices. This arouses my curiosity about the sound of a specific photograms that were filmed.

FR: In this same video there is a characteristic, which is very present in your work – the relation between image and music. How do you articulate these two elements and how do they coexist?
MS: The combination of sound and image is, normally, one of those cases in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts. I think I have used it in a very different way in each work.
Sometimes the audio is used to increase the power of immersion of a given video, even to increase the realism. It can carry a more important message than the image, or it can simply be used to create an atmosphere. It can also be used to change the meaning of the image. There is also music that I edit on CD and for which I create series of images or videos. There were cases in which I felt the necessity to illustrate a certain music, either mine or someone else’s, with images.
I think I use music and audio in different ways and with different functions.

FR: Many of your pieces use elements that touch on the copyright issue and raise questions about the crisis of the current concept of intellectual property. What is your feeling about these problems?
MS: It is a very complex issue of our times, in which we are surrounded by images, sounds, and words that belong to companies, while art continues needing the world around itself as raw material. Originally copyright served to stimulate literary creativity, and had a short period of duration, after which the creation entered public domain and became much more affordable. Up to the middle of the last century, classical music, blues, and a lot of other music only existed thanks to the recycling of musical heritage. A lot of modern music would never exist if it were necessary to ask all the authors for authorization for samples (sometimes hundreds of them).
I believe that each case need to be individually analyzed. I think that the question should be raised only when profits that belong to the original author are being misappropriated. Not when we use a small part to comment, critique or pay homage, as a form of art. That is, when Richard Prince used the images of the Marlboro Man in the 1970’s, he was in no way competing with Marlboro to sell cigarettes! By the same token, if I use a phrase of Michael Jackson for a musical composition, I’m not selling it as if it was his creation. Therefore, no one will stop buying his records because of mine.

FR: You often use digitally constructed images, such as the series of inverted craters, RetarC, or the two videos Place in Time (2005), Sparky (2002) or H2O (2004). In what way are you interested in photography as a means to construct possible inexistent realities?
MS: For me, photojournalism is an example of how photography can construct reality. The pictures that appear in the newspapers and illustrate our recent history, are, to a greater or lesser degree, premeditated. Even if I find this aspect interesting, I believe that in most cases I belong to the opposite field, using images to construct fiction.

FR: More than using 3D to explore a new media, (and such was the case of digital format when you started using it in the 1990’s), you seem to use it to create photographic situations that you don’t have access to. By this train of thought, these images become digital photographs, also dependent on the photographer’s choice of an exact, unique moment, in which they are captured and crystallised. Do you see your images as photographs or are they closer to traditional pictorial representation, like painting or drawing?
MS: Quite true. I undoubtedly see digital images as photography. In the case of 3D animation, which is closer to the concept of cinematic photography, all the concerns that we must have with these, (and many more), are the same ones we have in 3D: the choice of a lens, the angle, the lighting, etc.. If the scene is static, the moment is no longer crucial and we find ourselves in a photograph in which the moment is everywhere. In 3D, a universe (or theatre) is created for each scene, and that would be impossible in the real world. And I depend on absolutely no one to do it, which is a relief. I can have an enormous city on top of a slice of pizza, and go in through a window of one of the buildings, go to the kitchen and find another slice of pizza on top of the table with another city on top.
I am also interested in this fractional side because it is very close to the tools provided by nature, which makes 3D for me, something that is natural and not artificial. I would dare to say that it seems less artificial than painting on a canvas.FR: A phrase of Roland Barthes in Câmara Lucida, in which he refers that cinema is never a hallucination but just an illusion; his vision is oneiric and not ecmenesic, made me think of your work. Do you share this point of view in regard to your relationship between what you create and the elements you use as a starting point?
MS: I think that in cinema ecmenesia occurs when we see a film and establish our keyframes. The remains are not the sequence but certain scenes and key points that vary from person to person. But our will to accept illusion, even in unlikely and technically imperfect cases, like the cinema of Ed Wood, the so called Suspension of Disbelief theory, interests me very much. There are things that when we watched twenty years ago seemed highly credible and realistic and that nowadays are simply obsolete. In other cases this doesn’t occur. The theory of the Suspension of Disbelief lead us to both immerse in a film of Ed Wood as it allow us to believe in the exemption of the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman. It is an elastic force, which is also transformed according to our prejudices about what we see. If we want to believe, we do.
-

Filipa Ramos: I would like to know more about your training…
Miguel Soares: My contact with photography begins around 1985 at the Photography Club of the D. Pedro V high school in Lisbon. The club was oriented by professor Emilio Felício, who also taught chemistry, and it focused on the laboratory part in black-and-white, in other words, on the chemical side of photography.
In 1988 I enrolled in the Course of Photographic Studies at the Ar.Co.. During the first year I had Lúcia Vasconcelos as a teacher, which gave me a lot of enthusiasm, and the following year I had José Soudo, a great reference for all those who had him as a teacher. During that same year, which was an interim before entering the school of Fine Arts, I enrolled in a workshop of free drawing at the Monumental Gallery with the painter Manuel San Payo. At that time it was one of the most interesting and active galleries in Lisbon. It was when the photographer Álvaro Rosendo invited me to do an individual show. I was twenty years old and it was the beginning of an eleven-year relationship with that gallery.
In 1989 I entered the University of Fine Arts in Lisbon, were I got a degree in Equipment Design, on one hand to learn about different materials, and on the other because I didn’t want to spend five years painting and drawing, for I have been doing that since I was very young. What was important during this period was the creation of a group of friends, or it would have been an arduous experience. Among the members of that group were Miguel Mendonça (no longer with us), Tiago Batista, Alexandre Estrela, Nuno Silva, Pedro Cabral Santo, Rui Serra, Rui Toscano and Paulo Mendes. We soon began organizing collective shows in and outside the University. Exhibits like 1990, Faltam nove para 2000 or Wallmate (1995) in the University, Independent Worm Saloon at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes (1994), or O Império Contra-Ataca at the ZDB (1998); and Jamba (1997), Biovid (1998) and Espaço 1999, at the Sala do Veado, among others.FR: Are there any coordinates that modelled your present work? I could identify certain elements, like a reflection on what is real, a link between music and images, and an analysis of the mechanisms that regulate and determine perception, but I would like to hear it from you …
MS: There are interests which are constant from the beginning, because I am almost always centred on investigation and experimentation, but I think my concerns have varied quite a lot over time. The sort of things I did in 1992 were already very different from what I’ve done the previous year, and I believe that it has always been a bit like that. Howevere, sometimes I like to recapitulate and to tackle questions that I can rethink or improve, either for technological reasons, due to time, or to other motives. It is extremely difficult for me to identify the connecting threads that have prevailed during all this time. As an example I do know that music only starts appearing directly in my work around 1994. In terms of photography, between 1990 and 1994, I was a lot more interested in iconology and symbolism than I am nowadays. I think that my interest in design and architecture, as man-made creations, together with science, have been the most constant elements in my work over the years.FR: In fact, it is easy to recognize an interest for design and architecture, especially in the second half of the 1990’s, when you created objects like Racing (1994) or Beep (1998). In the same way, science seems to be a constant. I remember once Pedro Cabrita Reis said that he imagined you as one of those kids that were always playing with robots and carrying out chemistry experiments!Sometimes your work seems to be made in order to underline its basic and curious elements. This can be seen thorough the repetition of certain aspects (like in Untitled (Playing with Gould Playing Bach), 2007). It also happens when you another element, like in Expecting to Fly (1999-2001), in which the music of Buffalo Springfield gives a certain poetic/ironic touch to the situation, absurd and surreal in itself, of an automobile accident on a road with no movement. In what way are you interested in revealing tiny details in daily practices, using a photographic frame?
MS: I’m not sure I worry about that, except in the sense of the punctum that Roland Barthes mentions, the discovery of some element in an image that makes it special.
But we can analyse that individually. The repetition of Glenn Gould’s video deals with the fact that I have read about him being autistic. I had already used some Gould piano samples in my music, and I started thinking that if I had an image to accompany it, his autism – which wasn’t at all clear to me – would become obvious, and that’s what I tried to do in this video. I decided to compose four themes of about two or three minutes each, based only on segments of six to ten seconds of the Brandenburg Concert No. 5, filmed in 1962. In total, I used more or less half a minute to produce ten minutes. I mounted the sound by doing hundreds of tiny little cuts, without paying attention to the image, that came by association, just as if I was mounting music using the “cut and paste” method in an audio programme.
Expecting to Fly was quite a different process. That scene was filmed in 1999 and I spent two years trying to figure out what to do with it. I knew I had to find the right music to follow up the other video that I had filmed on my balcony (Untitled (two), 1999), but I only made up my mind in 2001.FR: Still talking about the use of apparently banal and daily elements, from which one can make new interpretations of what surround us, I would like to know a bit more about your new series Planets, (2008). In this case you used conventional photography to create a series of illusions that are unveiled as we pass through the images …
MS: My uncle illuminates his backyard with a series of round lights made in something that resembles Plexiglass. The lamp posts are about a meter high and the spheres are approximately twenty five centimetres. They are very old and you can notice it: some have moss, others have holes and cigarette burns, others have mud stains or insect debris, and some have yellowed. The type of light bulb used also varies, some are white or bluish and others are more yellow. What I did was to considerably close the diaphragm of the camera and photograph all the spheres from above, so that one couldn’t see the posts. They look like planets. Only at the end do I open slightly the diaphragm to reveal the mystery of a solar system that lies sleeping in my uncle’s yard.FR: The craters and palindromes portray an almost puerile curiosity to test the reality of things, their possibility of existing in slightly altered conditions. Where is this interest or desire to investigate a subtly distorted reality coming from?
MS: I am quite interested in it. It is almost like a scientific process: the hypothesis is formulated and then a series of tests are carried out to prove it. That is what happens in the series with the limousines (Liine, 2007). Or, for example, in the series retarC (2007), in which I thought that if I turned a crater upside-down it would look like a plateau. This idea came to me when I saw pictures of underground explosions that created slight elevations on the surface. I experimented, and it worked with some of the craters. I realized that the light was crucial for creating this effect, and sometimes I inverted the image so that the light would come always from the left, making the illusion bigger.FR: Sometimes you seem to take hold of the original images and alter them, recovering, let’s say, a certain primeval state of the elements represented. This is visible both in some of your earlier pieces, and recently in the series where you “remove” a part which had actually been an addition, giving back a more conventional look to the automobile (Liine). How do you characterize this interest in manipulating reality through photography?
MS: The case of the limousines had been in my head for over ten years because they look like normal cars that have been artificially stretched in a Photoshop, (the first ones I saw where on television and in magazines). I did this series mainly to satisfy my curiosity – how would the backgrounds look? Would the car seem like a normal car? Of course, there are second meanings: a shortening of distances, an appeal to slow down, environmental issues, an anti nouveau riche feeling, the effect of teleportation created by the transition of before and after the cut (visible in the Liine video, 2007). But all these interpretations depend on who is seeing it.FR: I find a similar attitude in Untitled (playing with Gould playing Bach) in which the chosen frames gained a certain suspension, between a movement and a static side, which characterizes all the representations of passed, and unrepeatable, elements. You appear to take photographs through the annulation the image’s movement in time. In what way can a picture result from video?
MS: As I explained previously, I fragemented small portions of the concert into hundreds of slices, sometimes in one, two or three frames, and with them I tried to compose music. The fact that each second of film consisted of twenty four photographs (photograms), or twenty five in the case of television or PAL video, enabled each photograph to be accompanied by a moment of sound with a certain duration – in cinema, 41,66 thousandths of a second of sound. This amount of time is more than enough to work with and, even eventually to stretch it in audio editing programes. If the sound is at 48KHz, it can still be divided into two thousand smaller slices. This arouses my curiosity about the sound of a specific photograms that were filmed.FR: In this same video there is a characteristic, which is very present in your work – the relation between image and music. How do you articulate these two elements and how do they coexist?
MS: The combination of sound and image is, normally, one of those cases in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts. I think I have used it in a very different way in each work.
Sometimes the audio is used to increase the power of immersion of a given video, even to increase the realism. It can carry a more important message than the image, or it can simply be used to create an atmosphere. It can also be used to change the meaning of the image. There is also music that I edit on CD and for which I create series of images or videos. There were cases in which I felt the necessity to illustrate a certain music, either mine or someone else’s, with images.
I think I use music and audio in different ways and with different functions.FR: Many of your pieces use elements that touch on the copyright issue and raise questions about the crisis of the current concept of intellectual property. What is your feeling about these problems?
MS: It is a very complex issue of our times, in which we are surrounded by images, sounds, and words that belong to companies, while art continues needing the world around itself as raw material. Originally copyright served to stimulate literary creativity, and had a short period of duration, after which the creation entered public domain and became much more affordable. Up to the middle of the last century, classical music, blues, and a lot of other music only existed thanks to the recycling of musical heritage. A lot of modern music would never exist if it were necessary to ask all the authors for authorization for samples (sometimes hundreds of them).
I believe that each case need to be individually analyzed. I think that the question should be raised only when profits that belong to the original author are being misappropriated. Not when we use a small part to comment, critique or pay homage, as a form of art. That is, when Richard Prince used the images of the Marlboro Man in the 1970’s, he was in no way competing with Marlboro to sell cigarettes! By the same token, if I use a phrase of Michael Jackson for a musical composition, I’m not selling it as if it was his creation. Therefore, no one will stop buying his records because of mine.FR: You often use digitally constructed images, such as the series of inverted craters, RetarC, or the two videos Place in Time (2005), Sparky (2002) or H2O (2004). In what way are you interested in photography as a means to construct possible inexistent realities?
MS: For me, photojournalism is an example of how photography can construct reality. The pictures that appear in the newspapers and illustrate our recent history, are, to a greater or lesser degree, premeditated. Even if I find this aspect interesting, I believe that in most cases I belong to the opposite field, using images to construct fiction.FR: More than using 3D to explore a new media, (and such was the case of digital format when you started using it in the 1990’s), you seem to use it to create photographic situations that you don’t have access to. By this train of thought, these images become digital photographs, also dependent on the photographer’s choice of an exact, unique moment, in which they are captured and crystallised. Do you see your images as photographs or are they closer to traditional pictorial representation, like painting or drawing?
MS: Quite true. I undoubtedly see digital images as photography. In the case of 3D animation, which is closer to the concept of cinematic photography, all the concerns that we must have with these, (and many more), are the same ones we have in 3D: the choice of a lens, the angle, the lighting, etc.. If the scene is static, the moment is no longer crucial and we find ourselves in a photograph in which the moment is everywhere. In 3D, a universe (or theatre) is created for each scene, and that would be impossible in the real world. And I depend on absolutely no one to do it, which is a relief. I can have an enormous city on top of a slice of pizza, and go in through a window of one of the buildings, go to the kitchen and find another slice of pizza on top of the table with another city on top.
I am also interested in this fractional side because it is very close to the tools provided by nature, which makes 3D for me, something that is natural and not artificial. I would dare to say that it seems less artificial than painting on a canvas.FR: A phrase of Roland Barthes in Câmara Lucida, in which he refers that cinema is never a hallucination but just an illusion; his vision is oneiric and not ecmenesic, made me think of your work. Do you share this point of view in regard to your relationship between what you create and the elements you use as a starting point?
MS: I think that in cinema ecmenesia occurs when we see a film and establish our keyframes. The remains are not the sequence but certain scenes and key points that vary from person to person. But our will to accept illusion, even in unlikely and technically imperfect cases, like the cinema of Ed Wood, the so called Suspension of Disbelief theory, interests me very much. There are things that when we watched twenty years ago seemed highly credible and realistic and that nowadays are simply obsolete. In other cases this doesn’t occur. The theory of the Suspension of Disbelief lead us to both immerse in a film of Ed Wood as it allow us to believe in the exemption of the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman. It is an elastic force, which
is also transformed according to our prejudices about what we see. If we want to believe, we do.